Dog day for the ABC

Sydney Morning Herald columnist

The ABC will not want to find itself in court 11E of the NSW Supreme Court anytime again soon. It has taken a battering on successive days in this courtroom.

On Thursday, in the case where the ABC is defending its right to depict and call the News Corp journalist Chris Kenny, ‘‘a dog f-----’’, on the grounds of satire, Justice Robert Beech-Jones lashed the broadcaster for ‘‘a massive exercise in ridicule which is vastly out of proportion".

The judge accepted two imputations raised by Kenny’s lawyers which means the matter will now proceed to a full hearing before a jury.

He rejected a third imputation that Kenny actually had sex with dogs.

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Ominously for the ABC, the judge described the segment, in which Kenny was depicted as having sex with a dog while strangling it, with the caption ‘‘Dog ‘F-----’’, as ‘‘an image that's likely to stay in the mind of the ordinary reasonable viewer long after the program has finished, whether it's funny or not."

The segment prompted a large number of complaints from viewers. The ABC conducted an internal review and exonerated itself.

In the same courtroom on Tuesday, the monetary cost of a refusal to admit error was very high when the ABC lost a defamation action by Dr Bruce Hall. Even after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Dr Hall, and even though the ABC will bear the the cost of litigation that dragged on for seven years, including Hall’s costs, the broadcaster issued a press release on Tuesday stating:

‘‘The settlement does not amount to an admission by any party to the case. In fact, the settlement reached represents a compromise on the part of all the parties to avoid litigation.’’ In 2006, the Australian Communications and Media Authority found that the ABC had failed to comply with its own code of conduct in failing to ensure that a report about Dr Hall was accurate and balanced.

In 2006, the ABC was also forced to apologise in the NSW Supreme Court after losing a defamation action by Hall’s wife, Dr Suzanne Hodgkinson. The ABC is also refusing to concede that a recent report by Paul Barry on ‘Media Watch’ did not contain omissions, distortions and unverified claims.

It was also forced to belatedly concede it had no corroborating evidence when it reported, repeatedly, that Royal Australian Navy personnel had tortured asylum-seekers while at sea.